George Morgan was a merchant, land speculator, and United States Indian agent during the American Revolutionary War.
Background
George Morgan was born on February 14, 1743, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Evan Morgan, a prosperous Philadelphia merchant who had emigrated from Wales probably about 1717, and Joanna Biles. Both his parents were dead before he was six years old.
Education
Morgan attended school in Philadelphia and at about thirteen years of age entered the service of Baynton and Wharton, merchants, as an apprentice.
Career
In 1763 he entered a new partnership with his employers, which became known as Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan. At the end of Pontiac's War the firm, interested in the fur trade, undertook a venture to the Illinois country, recently acquired from the French by England, to profit at the same time from supplying Indian goods to the Crown and provisions to the military posts in the Illinois.
He went to the Illinois as the representative of the firm and, though disappointed in his hopes for profits, became well known as a leader in the movement for the establishment of a civil government in the Illinois and as a judge in the civil court established there in 1768. When the trading venture failed the partnership went into a voluntary receivership, counting as the largest of its assets its share in the Indiana grant made by the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix in 1768 to the "suffering traders" whose goods had been destroyed by the Indians in 1763. The grant consisted of some 2, 862 square miles of land in what is now West Virginia, just south of the Pennsylvania line.
After a period of uncertainty the Indiana Company was reorganized in the spring of 1776 with Morgan as secretary-general and superintendent of the land office, with headquarters at Fort Pitt. The state of Virginia, claiming jurisdiction over this area, opposed the Indiana Company, and there ensued a long struggle in the legislature of Virginia, in the Continental Congress, and in the Supreme Court of the United States. Morgan was prevented from prosecuting his claim by the passage of the Eleventh Amendment to the Constitution in 1798.
During the Revolution he served in the double capacity of Indian agent for the United States in the middle department and deputy commissary-general of purchases for the western district, with the rank of colonel. Having served in these capacities, with headquarters at Fort Pitt, for about three years, he resigned in 1779.
He retired to his farm, "Prospect, " near Princeton, New Jersey, where he became a gentleman farmer. He dabbled in science in true eighteenth-century style and wrote several contributions to the proceedings of the two societies of which he was a member. His most notable study was an investigation of the life and habits of the Hessian fly, then attacking the eastern wheat fields. He published his results in various contemporary magazines, such as the American Museum (June, September 1787).
In 1789, with the financial support of Don Diego de Gardoqui, Spanish minister to the United States, he founded the colony of New Madrid, in Spanish Louisiana, now Missouri; but Don Esteban Miro, governor of Louisiana, having other plans for the settlement of Americans in Spanish territory, threw obstacles in the way of the project, and Morgan retired again to "Prospect. "
The last years of his life were spent at "Morganza, " his farm near Washington, Pennsylvania, whither he removed in 1796. There he continued his scientific farming, devoting special attention to grape culture. George Morgan died on March 10, 1810, in his Morganza home.
Achievements
Membership
George Morgan was a member of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of Agriculture and the American Philosophical Society.
Connections
On October 24, 1764, George Morgan married Mary Baynton and they had eleven children; out of them six died in their childhood.